Thursday, August 16, 2012

Dallas ISD improving faster than Texas!

This week a wonderful set of reports were released by Dallas ISD regarding student achievement and graduation rates since 2007. The first chart below is for all DISD students. It shows Dallas ISD is improving at more than twice the rate of Texas!
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Mention must be made of the wonderful progress for our Limited English Proficiency students in Dallas ISD, reflected in the chart below. The progress has been so positive that DISD is now almost 5 percentage points better than the state of Texas! We have much to celebrate!

The above reports are from data that is already 15 months old. All of this progress happened just before the current $5.4 billion in cuts to Texas schools by the 2011 Texas Legislature began to take effect. We must now collect current and future data and fill out this Texas 2011 Legislature Report Card below as we watch what is happening in our schools. Now tens of thousands fewer staff are working and they have over 100,000 more students.

The Cumulative Promotion Index (CPI) is the most timely and predictive of the above measurements as it only uses data from the current school year. All other measurements go back 4 years. With the CPI there are already strong indications that the progress documented on the charts above is about to end. The CPI has been improving wonderfully for DISD until now. See the chart below:
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In 2009 and 2010 Texas received almost $4 billion in Federal Stimulus Funds for education that allowed thousands of teachers to be hired. That was almost certainly one of the factors in the improvements documented in the chart above for 2009 and 2010. Then the staff cuts began to take effect in 2011 and have continued in 2012.

One factor that may continue to improve attendance in Texas Schools is the new deportation waiver program now starting. It should encourage students to remain in school, and/or return to school, to finish their education. It may counter some of the negative effects of loosing these tens of thousands of teachers. Hopefully the improvements will return.